Friday, July 17, 2020
Headlines for July 17, 2020
Worst, Most Misleading & Funniest Headlines for July 17, 2020
*Colin Powell Still Wants Answers
Subhead: In 2003, he made the case for invading Iraq to halt its weapons programs. The analysts who provided the intelligence now say it was doubted inside the C.I.A. at the time.
Powell’s latest Mea Non Culpa. “ I knew I didn’t have any choice,” Powell told me. “What choice did I have? He’s the president.”
Supporters of Powell like to claim that Powell was just being a "good soldier," but, with apologies to German readers, the proper colloquial term for Powell's behavior is that of a "good German." A "good soldier" not only doesn't have to obey illegal orders, it is his obligation to disobey them. From Powell's role in covering up the My Lai massacre, to his speech at the U.N. which even he recognized was filled with "bullshit," Powell has acted to promote illegal actions; in the latter case, he played a key role in moving American "establishment" opinion to support the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans.
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” Powell said in his calm, sonorous baritone. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
NYT writes: “Nearly all the intelligence Powell presented to the world in his speech turned out to be false.”
“In the audience in the General Assembly chamber was a young U.N. weapons inspector named Dawson Cagle, who had recently returned from Baghdad. Sitting next to Cagle was one of Hans Blix’s senior munitions experts, who had also just returned from Iraq’s capital. The expert’s mouth opened when Powell displayed photographs of trucks moving into a suspected weapons of mass destruction bunker hours before an inspection team was due to visit, followed by a photo of the inspectors filing through a now-empty bunker. “I’m in that photo,” the munitions expert whispered to Cagle. “I went into that bunker that those trucks pulled up to. There was a three-inch layer of pigeon dung covering everything. And a layer of dust on top of that. There’s no way someone came in and cleaned that place out. No way they could’ve faked that.””
Left I, 2015: We know now that virtually every word of that speech was an out-and-out lie. But what about then? To begin with, even if it turned out that Iraq did have WMD, the speech was still a lie from beginning to end. Because, contrary to Powell's assertions, the U.S. did not "know" that Iraq had seven mobile biolabs (to take just one of the allegations). It had been told they did by a single person, later revealed to have the curious code name "Curveball," who had told the German intelligence agents who debriefed him that he had never made any bioweapons nor seen anyone else do so. The Germans categorized his claims as "vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm" and categorized Curveball himself as "not a stable, psychologically stable guy." This kind of "evidence" was the basis for Powell's statement, which was not "we've heard that," or "we have reason to believe that," but "we know." It's true that the American public didn't learn about Curveball until 2004, but Powell certainly had. The only Defense Department analyst who had ever met Curveball had told Powell the day before his speech that his "information" was unreliable.
It wasn't just that the U.S. didn't really "know" that Iraq had WMD, as Powell claimed they did. In fact, the U.S. actually had quite reliable evidence that Iraq did not have WMD. In 1995, General Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and the Iraqi minister who had been in charge of Iraq's weapons programs, had defected to Jordan. Kamel told U.N. debriefers that after the Gulf War (which ended in early 1991), Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them. The U.S. government had managed to keep this story from the American public for years, but on Feb. 24, 2003, shortly after Powell's speech but still three weeks before the invasion actually happened, Newsweek broke the story, and two days later, the transcript of Kamel's testimony, which had been kept secret, was made public by a Cambridge University analyst.
My letter to the editor from 2003: http://lefti.blogspot.com/2013/03/left-i-on-news-10-years-ago.html
My discussion of the “if you knew then what you knew now…” excuse:
A tale of two generals, Colin Powell and Amer al-Saadi:
*U.S., Britain and Canada say Russian cyberspies are trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research
Friends on FB: Russia is stealing vaccine research. Lessons from the Iraq fiasco (or the Russiagate fiasco)? Forgotten.
7th paragraph of NYT article: “Attributing such attacks, however, is imprecise, an ambiguity that Moscow takes advantage of in denying responsibility, as it did Thursday.”
*Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership
“Defying”, as if the U.S. has jurisdiction over the economies of China and Iran.
*Over 600,000 in Hong Kong cast 'protest' vote against new security laws
“While the primaries are only for the opposition camp, the level of participation is seen as a guide to popular opinion in the city of 7.5 million people.”
True. But less than two weeks ago, there was another measure of popular opinion in Hong Kong which no corporate media reported #FakeNewsByOmission
*1.65 million HK residents sign petition opposing US and foreign meddling in China’s internal affairs
*White House informed of British ambassador’s complaint over Independent journalist’s arrest
#FakeNewsByOmission. Couldn’t find a single reference to this story in the US press.
Ivanka Trump posts photo holding Goya beans, draws criticism for using her position to promote a product
The story isn’t that she was criticized for her actions, the story is she broke the law. “Federal ethics laws prevent federal employees from using their positions “to endorse any product, service or enterprise.””
